Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

First published: 1975

Type of work: Historical fiction

Themes: Coming-of-age, death, family, gender roles, love and romance, politics and law, race and ethnicity, sexual issues, and social issues

Time of work: The early 1900’s

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: New Rochelle, New York City

Principal Characters:

• Little Boy, the narrator of the story
• Father, the owner of a fireworks factory and an explorer
• Mother, a conventional turn-of-the-century woman
• Mother’s Younger Brother, who is obsessed with the age’s reigning beauty, Evelyn Nesbit
• Evelyn Nesbit, the beautiful wife of Harry K. Thaw; she is seduced by the architect Stanford White
• Emma Goldman, a radical political organizer
• Tateh, (later,
• Baron Ashkenazy, ), a poor immigrant who becomes successful in themotion-picture industry
• Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a proud black man who takes his revenge when he is harassed by a group of firemen
• Henry Ford, the inventor of the automobile
• J. P. Morgan, the famous banker

The Story

Ragtime begins in peaceful New Rochelle in 1902. It is a stable time in U.S. history. Theodore Roosevelt is president, and communities such as New Rochelle count on the quiet and patriotic atmosphere. Just below the surface and at the fringes of such communities, however, are obvious signs of disturbance. The nation is receiving great numbers of immigrants, and radicals such as Emma Goldman are harshly criticizing the rich and decrying the injustice done to blacks and working people who are exploited in the factory system. The United States is on the verge of great changes, presaged by the invention of the automobile and the development of the motion-picture industry.

This story of the beginning of the century is told through the eyes of a young boy, referred to only as Little Boy. Through his naive sensibility, great changes and conflicts are registered. He notes, for example, how Mother’s Younger Brother is fixated on the young Evelyn Nesbit and follows her around. It seems less surprising, then, that Harry K. Thaw, the heir of a coke and railroad fortune, should shoot Stanford White for seducing his wife. It is apparent that an entire nation of men has desired Nesbit even as the society places strong restraints on the expression of sexual feelings.

Throughout the novel, historical characters and development are interwoven with the experience of Little Boy’s family. Thus, his father becomes one of Admiral Robert Peary’s men exploring the North Pole. Little Boy encounters a young immigrant, Tateh, who cleverly invents a set of moving pictures and eventually becomes a tycoon in the film industry. A proud black man, Coalhouse Walker, Jr., who visits Little Boy’s household to see their servant, a woman who has borne his child, becomes involved in taking over the J. P. Morgan Library, demanding satisfaction for the damage done to his beautiful new automobile by a gang of rowdy white firemen.

The plot of the novel is thus panoramic, covering society in the suburbs and in the city, among the immigrants, the comfortable middle class, and the rich. It deals with famous and with common people who sometimes cross one another’s paths—as in the case of Tateh and Evelyn Nesbit, who meet at a political meeting where Emma Goldman is speaking. The episodic structure of the novel provides striking vignettes of meetings between Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan, Jacob Riis (a famous photographer of the poor) and Stanford White (an architect of grand monumental buildings), of Sigmund Freud’s visit to the United States, of Harry Houdini’s famous escape acts, and of many other incidents and occurrences, some of which author E. L. Doctorow invents. Approximately the last third of Ragtime deals in riveting detail with Coalhouse Walker, Jr.’s elaborate revenge against the privileged white society that has demeaned him and destroyed his elegant new automobile.

Context

Ragtime is an innovative work of historical fiction. By using both fictional and historical characters, Doctorow wishes to show how his theme of change pervades the lives of Americans on every level. Paralleling the invention of a new music, ragtime, the desires of an entire society coalesce in the rebellious behavior of Younger Brother and in the visit of Sigmund Freud, who tours the United States and is put off by the raucous, uncouth dynamic of change.

The novel challenges young readers to consider exactly what history is. Doctorow clearly implies that history is not a collection of facts; indeed, young readers may have some difficulty in determining exactly which events actually happened and which events the author has invented for his novel. It seems to be Doctorow’s aim to call into question any authorized version of past events, and he is most sympathetic to characters who test authority. His reading of social change and a young person’s response to it might be compared with that of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Historical themes and a panoramic view of society in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) would provide a useful contrast to Doctorow’s contemporary work.

Doctorow is the author of several novels that explore American history and myth. In The Book of Daniel (1971), he alternates between first-and third-person narrators to tell the story of a couple modeled after the Rosenbergs, who were executed for spying against the United States during the Cold War period. In Loon Lake (1980), he follows the adventures of characters during the Great Depression. In Billy Bathgate (1989), he writes a comic novel in the vein of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to reveal the social issues of the Prohibition period. In each novel, he juxtaposes the psychology of individuals to the currents of the times. By doing so, Doctorow unites the headlines, the history books, and the common lives of the country’s people, showing that history and myth, the stories people tell about the times and about their own lives, contain a unity, that what motivates a Henry Ford also motivates a Coalhouse Walker, Jr. Doctorow’s view of the country is profoundly democratic; on its various levels and classes, the country remains, his books imply, a powerful, diverse, and yet coherent phenomenon.

Bibliography

Fowler, Douglas. Understanding E. L. Doctorow. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992. Provides criticism and interpretation of Doctorow’s works.

Garrison, David. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime.” Classical and Modern Literature: A Quarterly 17 (Winter, 1997): 103-115. Garrison asserts that classical myths from Ovid are elaborated in Ragtime. These allusions to Ovid create an ironic tone and exhibit a deep interest in transformation, thus Ragtime continues a tradition that began with Ovid.

Harter, Carol C., and James R. Thompson. E. L. Doctorow. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A study of Doctorow’s major fiction up to World’s Fair. Contains a chronology, a chapter on his biography, separate chapters on the novels, notes and references, and a selected bibliography. A succinct introductory study.

Levine, Paul. E. L. Doctorow. New York: Methuen, 1985. The first full-length study of the novelist’s career. Levine provides sound and often insightful readings of individual novels as well as substantial discussions of the recurring themes in the fiction: politics, the nature of fiction and history, and Doctorow’s critique of the American Dream. A useful bibliography and a discussion of film adaptations of Doctorow’s work make this a comprehensive study.

Persell, Michelle. “The Jews, Ragtime and the Politics of Science.” Literature and Psychology 42 (Fall, 1996): 1-14. A discussion of Ragtime as an allegory related to Francois Lyotard’s notion of “the jews” as a term for the unrepresentable. Persell analyzes the assimilation of the character Tateh who suppresses his Jewishness.

Williams, John. Fiction as False Document: The Reception of E. L. Doctorow in the Postmodern Age. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1992. A survey of Doctorow’s works with a focus on the author as a postmodern cultural critic. Williams presents a chapter-length discussion of Ragtime as a historical novel.